It’s no secret that social media and mobile communications have become a part of everyday life. But what makes social media so fascinating is how different people in different industries have adapted the technology and are using it to drive content to the consumers. College AD has shown you firsthand how social media and its various platforms have affected sport information personnel such as Georgia Tech’s Chris Yandle and Clemson’s Jonathan Gantt. College AD recently had the opportunity to sit down with Eric DeSalvo, Central Florida’s Director of Digital and Social Media. Eric gave us a firsthand look at how the marketing and promotions department at UCF are using social media to engage and entertain Knight fans and alumni.
College AD: As UCF’s Director of Digital and Social Media, how do you spend your days and what are your responsibilities?
Eric DeSalvo: On a day to day basis I’m doing a lot of monitoring as well as heading up the main athletic accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. We’re also utilizing Vine as well still. I’m also working on content creation, mostly for the main account but I also create some content for our specific sports accounts too.
CAD: Are you also responsible for maintaining the individual sport specific accounts or is that done on a team by team basis?
ED: Individual sport accounts are run through the sports information office. For example, if one SID works three sports it is their responsibility, they’re the ones overseeing those three sport social accounts. But I’m also strategizing with the sports information offices as well. We’ve come up with a lot of templates for them to utilize so everyone can work smarter, not harder.
CAD: So there is a lot of cooperation between your office and the SID office?
ED: Yes, I definitely would say there is. We’ve also got the luxury of having a multimedia correspondent work with us, his name is Chip Fontanazza. He does a lot of our video work. One of the things we definitely pride ourselves on is our student athlete stories we’re able to tell. “Everyday Champions” is what we call the series and for a lot of those stories we are utilizing a written feature as well as visuals and then video as well, and that’s where Chip comes in. Finally, we’re able package that all together and share it out across the platforms. Our fans really seem to enjoy the series; we’ve received tons of response to many of the stories.
CAD: Do you do more than just student athlete stories and game updates? You are in the marketing and promotions department, so how have you been able to utilize social media and the various platforms to get out the marketing message?
ED: I talk with my counterparts in marketing all the time and with sports info all the time, we have a collaboration amongst the two units and that’s key. As far as actual marketing goes, I handle our email marketing and use infographics to get our message out. We get a lot of our information to our season ticket holders through email. If we are looking for promotion for women soccer for example we’re going to reach out to many different people in our email database and target them, so it’s my responsibility to create the visuals for those emails as well as working with our marketing team for the information to put in the emails.
CAD: Has social media made it easier to get your message out and given you a greater ability to reach your fan base and alumni?
ED: Correct, our reach is continuing to grow every single day and that’s something we pride ourselves on. Twitter is my favorite platform because it creates that one on one engagement. As well your fans have a voice and it’s important to hear them, especially in times like this where is kind of rough for football…you get to hear what they are saying and might think like let’s go with a campaign to try to rally the troops but then you look at your twitter mentions, feed and searches and realize it might not be a good time for that. We don’t want to sound tone deaf to our fans, we have to listen to them.
CAD: That’s critically important it allows you to reach your fans in real time, it also allows your fans to reach you in a real time and like you said don’t sound tone deaf.
ED: Yeah, no question, this year has been a learning process. No one wants to have a losing season especially like the one we’re having, but at the same time I think we are able to learn from this. We’ve had a bunch of winning seasons in a row and now you are seeing the other side of it, and this is going to make us better as an athletics department in the long run.
CAD: Does UCF use a lot of social media interaction in game entertainment to keep the fans engaged?
ED: We do, although I wish we had better connectivity in our football stadium. That’s something we’re working on. We’ve updated our DAS system recently to help with out with that and I think as soon as next year we’ll be rolling out more ways to interact with our fans. Right now a lot of the promotions we are putting out are prior to games. We’re trying to keep our fans as informed as possible, one thing that we really like is the visual aspect of a game timeline for game days. We’re putting out game timelines. The day before we’re emailing our season ticket holders and everyone who purchase a ticket to that specific game. The email lays out the day’s events with icons, as well as with timing. It allows people to screenshot the email and save it to their phone for reference. We’re just trying to keep them as informed as possible in on one of the most visually impactful ways. Instead of just a glob of text sitting in their inbox.
CAD: So very little in game interaction now, just due facility limitations?
ED: I would say yes…unless fans are directly tweeting or sending a message on a platform. We aren’t doing any specific promotions in terms of player of the game or something like that.
CAD: But there are plans for the future?
ED: Definitely, we’ll have something to keep fans more engaged next football season. We’d love to have a little more digital interaction with our fans for sure.
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